Climategate

Comments

BR, how about you choose to believe what you want to believe, and I'll choose to believe what I want to believe. Because as individuals living in the United States of America, we are currently still permitted to do that (for the most part).

Science is about questioning the dogma. Questioning the status quo. Questioning the consensus. Right now, you and other adherents of the AGW religion seem to think a perceived consensus means no questions should be allowed.

The irony is that jg started this blog.....er....uh....thread. Maybe it's time to leave this and start afresh leaving this to jg.

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Originally Posted by jazzguru

By now I'm sure most of us have heard of the hacked e-mails and documents that make the meaning of the words "peer reviewed", "consensus", and "facts" utterly false when it comes to "anthropogenic climate change".

If you haven't heard, here's a fantastic resource to help you get up to speed on the latest:

If we want to read your links to right wing climate denial blogs we'll seek them out ourselves.

if you start your own climate denial aggregator we might even seek out yours. You never know.

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Originally Posted by Mumbo Jumbo

That's nice.

YOU, SIR, SHOULD START A BLOG, BY CRIMINEE.

If you want a propganda aggregator, START A BLOG. Fine Tunes just debunks this shit remorselessly every time and you never bother to respond. So just START A BLOG AND TURN THE COMMENTS OFF.

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Originally Posted by BR

......

You continue to post links from people that have been proven time and time again to distort the actual picture of what's going. They use faulty math, logic, and science to advance an agenda. Their fallacious reasoning has been debunked numerous times, yet because they are from the "other side," you somehow decide that they still must receive equal weight. I'm sorry, they don't......

And even if all this nonsense you are spouting even has the slightest shred of truth, which I certainly WILL NOT concede, what's the end result?

(PhysOrg.com) -- Despite scientific evidence of climate change, it will take a significant cultural shift in attitudes to address the situation, says a University of Michigan researcher

The shift would be much like what has happened with recent cigarette smoking bans and even similar to the abolition of slavery in the 19th century.

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"The present reality is that we tend to overlook the social dimensions of environmental issues and focus strictly on their technological and economic aspects," said Andy Hoffman, the Holcim (U.S.) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the Ross School of Business and School of Natural Resources and Environment. "To properly address climate change, we must change the way we structure our organizations and the way we think as individuals.

"It requires a shift in our values to reflect what scientists have been telling us for years. The certainty of climate change must shift from that of being a 'scientific fact' to that of being a 'social fact.'"

In an article published in the current issue of the journal Organizational Dynamics, Hoffman compares the current cultural attitudes toward climate change to historical societal views on smoking and slavery.

For years, scientists pointed to data that would suggest that smoking causes lung cancer, but the general public consciousness ignored that fact, he says.

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"And yet, the general public now accepts belief that smoking and second-hand smoke cause lung cancer," said Hoffman, who is also associate director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise. "They have become 'social facts' and with that shift, action becomes possible."

Hoffman says that climate change today still resides in the "pre-social" fact phase, awaiting public acceptance. He points to the abolition of slavery as an example of the magnitude of the cultural and moral shift it will take in order for climate change to become a social fact.'"

During the 1700s, slavery was a primary source of energy and wealth around the world, especially in the British Empire. Abolitionism was seen as a challenge to the way of life in Great Britain, leading to the collapse of its economy. It would eventually take about 100 years to abolish slavery.

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"Just as few people saw a moral problem with slavery in the 18th century, few people in the 21st century see a moral problem with the burning of fossil fuels," Hoffman said. "Will people in 100 years look at us with the same incomprehension we feel toward 18th-century defenders of slavery? If we are to address the problem adequately, the answer to that question must be yes?our common atmosphere will no longer be seen as a free dumping ground for greenhouse gases and other pollutants."

But Hoffman says this value shift will require people to come to terms with a new cultural reality: first, that we have grown to such numbers and our technologies have grown to such a capacity that we can, and do, alter the Earth's ecological systems on a planetary scale; and second, that we share a collective responsibility and require global cooperation to solve it.

According to Hoffman, research and experience support the conclusion that there is a range of individual- and organizational-level biases that operate to maintain current behaviors that do not support sustainability.

Organizations must augment the development of new protocols for carbon accounting or economic incentives to reduce emissions in order to overcome these obstacles and to change the culture and values of the organization, he says.

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"These alterations must integrate sustainability concerns into the existing routines by which business strategies are constructed, recasting them in ways that are mutually beneficial to the objectives of individuals, organizations and the sustainability of the ecosystem on which they depend," he said. "The solutions to climate change within the organization must emerge from an alteration of the organizational system, reaching deep into the levels of the core beliefs and values that members hold toward the relationship among the organization, the market and the natural environment. It involves the unlearning of what has been ingrained."

Hoffman says that organizations must develop a climate strategy by conducting an emissions profile assessment, gauging risks and opportunities, evaluating options, and setting goals and targets. Once a strategy is established, organizations must create financial mechanisms to support climate programs and get employee buy-in by educating and rewarding its work force. Finally, organizations must be aware of regulatory policy options that would most benefit their own business strategies and ideally "gain a seat at the table" when future regulations are designed.

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"For business, the rules of the game are changing, and companies are finding that the implications of these changes have deep cultural significance for their organizational purpose and objectives," Hoffman said. "No solution to climate change will ever be found if we do not spend time changing the culture and values by which we make and implement our decisions."

Modern climate change is dominated by human influences, which are now large enough to exceed the bounds of natural variability. The main source of global climate change is human-induced changes in atmospheric composition. These perturbations primarily result from emissions associated with energy use, but on local and regional scales, urbanization and land use changes are also important. Although there has been progress in monitoring and understanding climate change, there remain many scientific, technical, and institutional impediments to precisely planning for, adapting to, and mitigating the effects of climate change. There is still considerable uncertainty about the rates of change that can be expected, but it is clear that these changes will be increasingly manifested in important and tangible ways, such as changes in extremes of temperature and precipitation, decreases in seasonal and perennial snow and ice extent, and sea level rise.Anthropogenic climate change is now likely to continue for many centuries. We are venturing into the unknown with climate, and its associated impacts could be quite disruptive.

Ample physical evidence shows that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the single most important climate-relevant greenhouse gas in Earth?s atmosphere. This is because CO2, like ozone, N2O, CH4, and chlorofluorocarbons, does not condense and precipitate from the atmosphere at current climate temperatures, whereas water vapor can and does. Noncondensing greenhouse gases, which account for 25% of the total terrestrial greenhouse effect, thus serve to provide the stable temperature structure that sustains the current levels of atmospheric water vapor and clouds via feedback processes that account for the remaining 75% of the greenhouse effect. Without the radiative forcing supplied by CO2 and the other noncondensing greenhouse gases, the terrestrial greenhouse would collapse, plunging the global climate into an icebound Earth state.

Should not be interpreted that increasing CO2 levels are a good thing. There was always a CO2 component in the atmosphere. From this you can project that increasing CO2 can mean more retention of heat---there is a balance.

Emissions of short-lived species contribute significantly to the climate impact of transportation. The magnitude of the effects varies over time for each transport mode. This paper compares first the absolute climate impacts of current passenger and freight transportation. Second, the impacts are normalized with the transport work performed and modes are compared. Calculations are performed for the integrated radiative forcing and mean temperature change, for different time horizons and various measures of transport work. An unambiguous ranking of the specific climate impact can be established for freight transportation, with shipping and rail having lowest and light trucks and air transport having highest specific impact for all cases calculated. Passenger travel with rail, coach or two- and three-wheelers has on average the lowest specific climate impact also on short time horizons. Air travel has the highest specific impact on short-term warming, while on long-term warming car travel has an equal or higher impact per passenger-kilometer.

Figure 1: Observed increase atmospheric CO2 derived from direct measurements, taking the average of Mauna Loa (Hawaii) and the South Pole (thin solid line) and two ice cores: Law Dome (dashed thin line) and Siple (thin dotted line). This is compared to total anthropogenic emissions (thick solid line) and 46% of total emissions (thick dashed line). (Knorr 2009

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The airborne fraction is calculated from the rate of human CO2 emissions and changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration. The global increase in atmospheric CO2 has been directly measured since 1959 and can be calculated from ice cores for earlier periods. Primarily, CO2 emissions come from fossil fuel combustion with a lesser contribution from land use changes. Fossil fuel combustion is calculated from international energy statistics. CO2 emissions from land-use changes are more difficult to estimate and come with greater uncertainty. Land use emissions are estimated using deforestation and other land-use data, fire observations from space and carbon cycle modeling.

Knorr also finds the 150 year trend while Le Quéré looks at the last 50 years. This may be significant. If the airborne fraction is increasing, it is possibly a recent phenomenon due to natural carbon sinks losing their absorption ability after becoming saturated. Several studies have found recent drops in the uptake of CO2 by oceans (Le Quere 2007, Schuster 2007, Park 2008). However, with such a noisy signal, this is one question that will require more data before being more fully resolved.

Lastly, some perspective. There are still areas of uncertainty associated with the carbon cycle. Because of this uncertainty, scientists are currently debating whether the airborne fraction is steady at 43% or slightly Increasing from 43%. Unfortunately, some skeptics use this uncertainty to hold the position that the airborne fraction is closer to 0%.